Ruggers, what gives?

Do you play for the mayhem? The third-half libations? Or for the bonds that last a lifetime? However you define its appeal, rugby at Drew has had a glorious 50-year run.

And it’s far from over.

By Christopher Hann

Photography by Bill Cardoni

This spring marks 50 years since Drew students first convened a team of young men to compete against squads from other colleges, many of them institutions much larger than Drew, in the mostly untried and only vaguely familiar game of rugby. And over the ensuing half-century Drew rugby players of both genders—a women’s team was founded in 1992—have forged a communal bond that extends far beyond the broken noses and bloodied scalps received on the rugby pitch. “The closest and dearest friends in my life are my DRFC teammates,” Tony Buttacavoli ’82 wrote in this magazine three years ago, referring to the Drew Rugby Football Club. “We have stood up for each other at our weddings and are godfathers to each other’s children. We are family.”

Test Your Rugby IQ

To commemorate the golden anniversary of rugby in the Forest, we present the following quiz, giving special attention to that coterie of pioneers who introduced the game to Drew.

At Drew, rugby operates as a club rather than a varsity sport, and thus the teams are neither governed nor financed by the university. Given the heightened sense of irreverence and individuality that seems particular to practitioners of the sport, this is no mere incidental distinction. In rugby, a game with ancient roots, participants spend 80 minutes trying to inflict all manner of bodily hurt upon their opponents in an attempt to prevent them from scoring a three-point try—the rough approximation of a touchdown in American-style football. At game’s end, members of both sides shake hands and proceed to what is known as “the third half,” the ritual post-game display of solidarity expressed by the collective singing of song and quaffing of beer. Generations of Drew ruggers have honored this ritual with religious devotion.

Close to Heart

The tattoo of a pouncing wolf emblazoned across the left side of Chris Deraney’s rib cage serves as a daily reminder of the bonds he’s forged as a Drew rugger. Alongside the wolf are the names of two rugby teammates, Bryan Case ’10 and Larry Pierre, who died within a four-month span in 2011.

Pierre held on for ﬁve days after being shot. Photo courtesy Chris Deraney

Case told The Acorn that rugby “came to deﬁne the time that I spent at Drew.” Photo courtesy Chris Deraney

Case, a member of the Army Reserves, was deployed following his sophomore year, spending a year in Iraq as a psychological operations specialist. Upon returning to Drew, Deraney says, Case suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and passed away in April 2011. Pierre was killed by stray gunfire in his hometown of Elizabeth, N.J., in July 2011. “It was my memorial to them,” Deraney says of his tattoo, “the way I accepted they were gone.”

As you might expect, nothing about the tattoo’s image is accidental, not even its geography. According to Deraney, the rib cage is the most painful part of the body on which to receive a tattoo. “I wanted to go through that for them, to offer up that pain for them,” Deraney says, “to make it more memorable and more important to me.”

The wolf was chosen, he says, because it’s his “spirit animal.” “It’s a pack animal,” Deraney says. “It’s stronger in a pack.”

The names of Case, a former roommate, and Pierre were inscribed (in Deraney’s handwriting) in Arabic, because Deraney is of Lebanese descent. “I didn’t want it to be an obvious memorial tattoo,” he says. “I wanted it to mean more to me than anyone else.”

Like so many who came before him, Deraney, an English major and music minor, had never played rugby before enrolling at Drew. But he took to the sport immediately, drawn in large part, as the tattoo attests, by the singular intensity of the team’s fellowship.

“The team,” Deraney says, “has really been one of the most important parts of my Drew career.

Ruggers Forever

Currently, some 25 men, including Charles “MintBerry Crunch” Sutter ’16, and about 29 women play the sport; their rugby monikers include Boom Boom, The Kraken, Mopery, Lady Macbeth and Squidward.

Ruggers of either gender aren’t hard to find—they’ve staked their claim to a regular table in the Commons.

Aaron “Queenie” Arias ’16

Adrianna “Antoine Dodson” Hardaway ’14

Doug “VoJo” Molina ’16

Captured in pencil by Carnahan, Princeton fell hard in 1969 to Drew, 10–0, in a game that Hunt Jones ’70 remembers as “extremely intense, bloody and exhausting.”

Players back to the Class of 1980 gather at the reunion alumni game on Sept. 29, 2012.

Don Clarke ’72 and Biff Clark ’69 at the fabled 1968 game against Army at West Point. Lescault scored the tying try and Clarke converted the winning kick for a triumphant score of 5–3.

Coach Steve Carnahan ’67 at the fabled 1968 game against Army at West Point.

Mike Lescault ’71 at the fabled 1968 game against Army at West Point. Lescault scored the tying try and Clarke converted the winning kick for a triumphant score of 5–3.

Life is real frustrating, and sometimes you just need to hit someone and not get in trouble for it. —Judea Hill ’13

Rugby IQ Answers

1. Pita J. Ala’ilima ’64.
Ala’ilima was the founder and first captain of the Drew men’s rugby team. A native of Western Samoa, he was one of the few members of that maiden squad who had actually played the game before coming to Drew.

2. Robert Oxnam.
For its first three years the team played in hand-me-down soccer jerseys. “They were made out of some plastic material,” says Hunt Jones ’70. “When you sweated, all the water stayed inside the shirt. You just got hotter and hotter.” In 1966 Oxnam stepped in, buying 30 authentic rugby jerseys from an Australian manufacturer.

3. Don Clarke ’72.
Clarke’s 45-yard conversion kick, following a try by Mike Lescault ’71, gave Drew a 5–3 victory in a fiercely contested game at West Point, with plenty of Army brass in attendance for Homecoming. The Drew squads of the 1960s often surprised more established rugby clubs such as Rutgers, Columbia and Princeton. “They probably put us on the schedule for Homecoming weekend as a sacrifice,” Clarke says of the Army game. “It obviously didn’t work out the way they had hoped.”

4. The pig.
After each season the team would bid farewell to the mascot, then savor it during a team pig roast.

5.The men’s rugby team members typically carpooled to away games. But during one stretch in the 1970s and ’80s, the team splurged on a charter bus (yes, it was blue) and a driver. The trip took its name from a lyric in a song by The Doors, “The End.” (“C’mon baby, take a chance with us / And meet me at the back of the blue bus.”) The Blue Bus Trip inspired many memorable stories. Here’s just one. In the early 1980s the team was headed to New York City, its post-game keg of beer stored securely in the luggage hold below the bus. Or maybe not so securely. As the bus approached a tunnel, the keg crashed through the hold’s door and went bounding through traffic. The ruggers gave chase, corralled the keg and restored it to the hold, this time securely.

6. Bill Bernhard ’82.
In a 1987 game against Tunisia in Pebble Beach, Calif., Bernhard scored 14 points in a 47–13 blowout.

8. Emily (Riggs) Fennessey ’96.
After forming in the spring of 1992, the club endured an inauspicious launch, with an uneven turnout of players and a regular turnover of coaches. Riggs scored her try for the Brewsers during a scrimmage in the spring of her senior year. Today, the team’s affiliation with the Morris Rugby Club, which has provided coaches the past three years, has given the team some much-needed stability.

9. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Schaefer Cup was awarded to the winner of the annual match between Drew and Princeton.
The Tigers were a perennial rugby power, but in the spring of 1969 Drew prevailed, 10–0. Alas, in the aftermath, the Schaefer Cup never materialized, and the Princeton team, defying rugby tradition, did not stick around. As Hunt Jones ’70 recalls, it was the first time the Drew ruggers conducted their post-game party on campus. “We were so elated and so noisy,” Jones says. “There were multiple reports of too much merriment.”

10. Former Drew rugby coach Alex Boraine G’69, a native of South Africa, was appointed by Nelson Mandela to be deputy chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was created in 1995. He wrote about the experience in A Country Unmasked: Inside South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Oxford, 2001).

11. John Hinchcliff G’69 and Roger Martin ’65.
Hinchcliff, from New Zealand, was a standout player-coach from 1965 to 1968. Later he became president of Auckland University of Technology. Martin, who played with Pita Ala’ilima and was coached by Alex Boraine, later ascended to the presidency of both Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pa., and Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va.

12. A 50-second YouTube clip starring women’s rugger Judea Hill ’13.
In the video, taken during a 2010 game at Columbia, Hill catches a pass and rumbles toward the try line. En route, she encounters a would-be Columbia tackler. Upon impact, the Columbia player is tossed backward, ragdoll-like, about the length of a New York City block. “I didn’t even know what happened to her,” Hill says of her unfortunate opponent. See for yourself at drew.edu/judeahillrugger.

14 Responses to “We Are One”

Pete, I do believe you are correct and perhaps one of a few that actually saw the cup. I witnessed the cup at Andy’s Tavern ( beater tavern then) in a glass case in ’75. Andy’s was the tiger rugger, roundball, and crew stop after practice, and Don Clarke and I were playing for the new Princeton Internationals (later the Princeton Athletic Club) that year which was an easy stop after practice. I drank Schaefer tall boys back then well before Narragansett bought out RJ Schaefer so our 1969 victory without the cup was celebrated through steel cans.

Your note about Coach Davis was spot on though mild. Rugby did, to a point, steal away some athletes or otherwise compete for them. I was supposed to play tennis for him under the quirky terms of admission but played only one match because of the rugby spring schedule, whereupon he said to me, “We don’t like your kind here.” How to respond to that? Alton Sawin was more direct, if that’s possible, since the rugger image not only detracted from that Drew was trying to portray but also was a a negative impact on studies which naturally it was…along with accepted and promoted athletic programs. Not everyone at Drew was there to stipple Botany drawings. I recall being quizzed by Sawin in a summoned office visit to determine what I was learning. Simester was always supportive as was Oxnam, Don Jones, von der Heide, and Chapman, but with Oxnam we knew we were safe.

The “Rugby Love” article in the letters to the Editor by Pita Ala’ilima was good but not exactly accurate. The Schaefer Cup, to be awarded to the winner of the annual Drew-Princeton Rugby Match, may have morphed to recognize the Attorney and supporter of Rugby, Robert Schaefer, but it did not start out that way.
When we started Rugby in 1966 and 1967, the Drew RFC was not looked on favorably by many of the Powers of the University. Coach Davis disliked us. We stole his prime baseball and soccer players; we were not recognized by his Athletic Department; and we had these great off campus beer parties which he and others detested. And we won and won against known Universities.
At that time the R. J. Schaefer Brewing Company (maker of the New York based Schaefer Beer), had TV ads on sporting events called the “Schaefer Circle of Sports”. They would feature an unusual sport or sporting event in the segment usually broadcast on baseball and football games.
In an attempt to give the Rugby Club some visibility. prestige and recognition, I contacted the R.J. Schaefer Brewing Company and asked if they would feature Drew RFC in a “Circle of Sports” segment and sponsor an Annual Cup Match between the only two teams from New Jersey in the Eastern Rugby Union. They declined to do a segment for a commercial, but offered to Sponsor the R.J. Schaefer Cup between the two schools. They sent me to the famous silversmith, Michael C. Fina of New York, where I picked up the handsome silver cup and toted it back in my passenger seat to Drew.
We had the First R.J. Schaefer match that Spring. President Oxnam presented the Cup to the winner, Princeton, on that cold and rainy day. President Oxnam was regaled in his new Drew RFC Blazer and tie.
There we were, with the University President, celebrating our forbidden (on campus) beer drinking sport, with the trophy sponsored by a Brewery.

I salute The Drew Magazine staff for a long overdue article on 50 Years of Drew Rugby ! I also thank Hunt Jones for his recounting of events connected to the Drew Vs Princeton & Drew Rutgers Rugby games of the late 60’s….. Drew Rugby was an important piece of my Drew Experience from 1965 to 1969. I look forward to celebrate with my Drew Rugby teammates at the Drew Rugby 50 Event on April 27th at Drew……

Biff, The (annual) Schaefer Cup was just between Drew and Princeton. We never lost to Rutgers despite the semi-annual bloodbath, although some games were “called” by the ref due to non-stop melees. It was either your pass to Eddie Corrigan late in the game or Dwight Davies’s (Dwight may have left the game by then with a broken leg) that sealed the victory. The Schaefer Cup was “installed” in a case at Andy’s Tavern in Princeton where Don Clarke and I saw it without the Drew victory tag when we played for Princeton Athletic in the 70’s which, by the way, continued against the same Rutgers alumni thugs under Old Scarlett, some games of which were also called. There may be more on The Schaefer Cup game in the spring 2013 Drew on-line Mag. Good to hear from you.
Hunt Jones